The Alternative
by ACleverName2
Summary: Written as an entry for the Fifth Morbidity Contest. Christine discovers a mysterious bottle guarded fiercely by Erik. What's inside? Future generations want to know.


**The Alternative **

Paris 1881

"I'll do it, Erik," she cried between sobs. "No talk now of rational or irrational; you know that I'm capable of it!"

Christine held at arm's length, between the mantle and the hard stone floor of the fireplace, a small amber bottle. She swayed from side to side, as if suffering from a headache.

The monster calmly folded his dead fingers, looking across at her from the doorway. "My dear mademoiselle, I have given you the bag of life and death." He inclined his masked head toward the mantle, where a beautiful set of a bronzed sculptures—one in the shape of a sleek grasshopper, and one in the shape of a rust-red scorpion—were quite at odds with the rest of the décor. "What you are holding is not an alternative."

Christine still walked the house on the lake with anxiety and worry. It was beginning to tell on her complexion, once healthy, now waxen. A cynical person would have compared its sallowness to the death's-head she had recently unmasked, that had raged above her in senseless anger, then rolled to her feet in pitiable anguish. She had told the Voice—the man—Erik—that his face did not matter to her, and in her lies she had fashioned a web of entrapment.

She was indifferently aware of the interior design of the main room, its charmingly old-fashioned Louis-Philippe style. The furniture all gave signs of having been used, perhaps in someone's moded apartment, for several years. Christine conjectured as to whom this furniture may have belonged originally. Despite its age, its condition was good, and she decided it had not belonged to a household with children.

Her attention was arrested by the mantle. There were touches in the house that belied its snug, bourgeois character—an ornament here and there, Oriental in design, or Romantic in style, that recalled to mind Erik's ridiculously vague statement that he came from no country and that his name was a mistake of chance. "He, too, is a mistake of chance," she whispered, looking at the small, strange pieces of sculpture on the mantle. She did not know that the multi-armed creature she examined was Shiva, destroyer of the universe, and that the beautiful Persian tile was called _glhami _and over one hundred years old. She plucked up the small, amber bottle on the mantle and looked into it.

"Christine, my dear, will you put that down?" She trembled, nearly dropping the bottle. The monster had entered the room, casting a shadow over everything in his black vestment, in his mask that muffled his too-sweet voice. "Put it down," he repeated, tersely.

She obeyed, attempting to disguise her fright, but she did not move back from the mantle. "I thought it was a perfume bottle," she said, steadying her voice but unable to meet the eyes in the mask. "I was going to inquire about the scent. I thought . . ."

"You thought perhaps it was a present from an admirer?" She could not pretend to mistake the sound of pain and self-derision in that otherworldly voice. "Let me assure you, Christine, that it is not perfume. In fact, that particular piece of glass is empty."

"It's not empty," Christine replied.

Erik took a few nearly-silent steps toward her. "How can you be certain?"

Christine wondered if he was playing a joke on her. She glanced back at the amber glass, distinctly aware of clear liquids moving slightly within—and preternatural warmth. "There's something liquid inside, and it appears to be moving." Her voice caught a slight tremor, because as she said this, she realized that whatever was inside the bottle, it seemed almost alive.

Erik moved closer to her; she cast her eyes down so as not to look at him, though she was assailed by pangs of guilt. The monstrous dry, yellow hands crept out of his sleeve and touched the side of the bottle, caressing it. "You would not believe me if I told you what was inside this bottle, Christine." His voice was grave. "And I suggest you do not ask. I thought we had together discovered the danger of a young lady playing Pandora—" Christine winced "—and would have thought you were beyond such petty curiosity."

He turned around. "If you would care to join me in the dining room, I've prepared a light dinner."

"I am not hungry," she said absently, her eye fixed on the swirling liquids inside the amber glass. She turned to him, suddenly angry. "I shall eat when I please and not at your bidding." It was a challenge. He had so far behaved gallantly, but she would not be bullied—even if she was frightened of him.

He shot back a look angrier, more threatening than her own. But it disappeared under the mask, and he said, with smooth gentility, "I wouldn't tempt fate. But you do need to eat, hungry or not. You haven't had anything since yesterday afternoon."

"It's poison, isn't it?" Christine asked, dropping her head to her breast contemplatively. "It's to kill me—or to kill someone—"

Christine thought that he laughed, but then she wasn't sure it wasn't a sob. "Poison? Your imagination is really more extensive than I would have credited you with. Besides, why would I want to destroy something that is . . . very dear to me . . ." She looked back and saw that he trembled. She was silent, ashamed that he loved her though her skin crawled whenever he came near enough for her to smell death upon him. "Come to dinner," he said softly, "and I will tell you about my little amber bottle."

Christine ate silently, hesitating to offer compliments to the chef for fear he would forget his promise. She saw that he ate only a piece of bread and a half-glass of red wine to her sole, salad, bread, and cheese. When she had finished, she looked up at him eagerly. His glance was elsewhere. "Erik?" she asked.

"You won't believe me." He sighed. "But you _have_ eaten, like the good girl that you are."

"Please tell me, Erik," she said slowly.

"I said before—" he poured her cold, clear water from a frosted decanter—"that I would not use poison to kill. But in the past I have done so. In the past, I have done many things that would shock you. I dislike speaking of them to you." He paused, she imagined waiting for her to put a stop to his narrative. "I spent a time in Persia, as a royal advisor to the Shah-in-Shah. Indeed, it was he who gave me that amber bottle that so fascinates you. Lovely glass, no?" She nodded. "It was given to him by a visiting Venetian prince. I liked to have things of beauty around me then, as I do now—" he hazarded a look at her, which she avoided. "But I could not really see the necessity of having such a thing around unless I used it to some purpose.

"The silly old Daroga, that is, the chief of police—he told me I should use it to hold some kind of liquor—he knew I was exceedingly fond of fine wine." Erik raised his glass appreciatively. "But I had a rather different idea in mind. The Daroga and I, we had an interesting acquaintance between us. He caught the criminals, the Shah's enemies, and I . . . took care of them." Christine looked away. "You shudder Christine, but you understand me.

"I had a certain scientific curiosity. I am not religious in the sense that your charming young man is—not Catholic. Nevertheless, I was curious about the finite nature of the _soul. _The Hebrew word, Christine, is _rooah, _in case you wanted to know—meaning 'essence.'

"The Christians and the Jews, as you are no doubt aware, are not the only ones to have ideas about the soul." Christine stared at him. "For a Muslim, like the Daroga, Man was thought to have come about by Allah blowing a bit of soul into him. This soul was thought to grow after birth, depending upon how righteous a person strives to be in his lifetime." He looked down, Christine thought a little sadly. "Hindus, whom I spent time amongst in India, called the soul _Atman. _For them, the soul is made of eternity, knowledge and bliss.

"But I fear I am boring you needlessly. Let me come to my point. I myself was most interested in the theories of Plato. He also believed the soul comprised of three parts, but his divisions were: reason, or _logos, _the . . . appetite—" Erik looked away from Christine and licked his lips, "—and the spirit. This essence was, for him, an incorporeal part of our being. I wondered if there was any way to capture this soul of Plato's definition—to keep it from dying with the body. It was of great interest to me in particular if this appetite could be separated from the other three."

"Why would you want to separate them?" asked Christine.

"Just curiosity, my dear; could a soul function on reason and spirit alone? On the concept that body and the tri-part soul were two separate entities entirely, I did not see why I could not separate the two at the critical moment."

"What is the critical moment?"

His golden eyes met her soft blue ones directly. "The last moment of life. The last moment before the candle is snuffed." The wistful way he spoke reminded her of when he had shown her the coffin in his chamber. "The Daroga brought in a man who had made an attempt on the Shah's life. The Shah demanded his death, naturally. It was the perfect chance to test my theory. At the moment of death, I placed the amber bottle to his lips and sealed it up when I felt his heart stop beating." The monster shrugged. "Other things intervened, my interest waned, and so I have not opened it since."

Dark shapes of disgust melted over Christine's face. "That's dreadful, Erik." She sighed.

"But you don't believe me? You don't believe that I have captured a soul within that bottle?"

"I don't know," she confessed. "But I am glad you stopped me from dropping it."

Christine let her tears fall unheeded, one hand clutching the mantle, one holding the warm amber bottle. "You were afraid from the beginning! You were afraid I would drop it in carelessness!"

"Why would I be afraid?" he asked, amused.

"Because the soul inside wants revenge on you! You didn't merely just capture a condemned man's breath in his bottle, Erik, you captured Revenge itself!"

To her morbid satisfaction, he stood uncertainly, his eyes frowning from beneath the mask. "You have no idea what will happen if you break that bottle, Christine," he said. "What certainty do you really have that whatever is in that bottle will attack me and not you? What certainty do you have that it will spare the men in the chamber behind you? Or anyone in the Opera above us?"

"Don't come any closer!" Christine cried. "Let them go, Erik, please, just let them go."

"We spoke lightly before about Pandora's Box. What you are suggesting is much nearer to the truth. If that is something for which you wish to be responsible—"

Christine looked at the amber bottle, at the angry liquids swelling inside. She glanced over her shoulder at the bare wall, at the grotesque figures of the grasshopper and scorpion. "You said you never wanted to destroy anything dear to you . . ." She placed the amber bottle back onto the mantle and moved toward the monster with her arms outstretched. "Please, Erik, please give me the key to that room." Her hands touched the mask.

He pulled away. "Out of my little bag of life and death, mademoiselle, I have given you your choices—"

"No!"

"—and they are the scorpion and the wedding mass, or the grasshopper—"

"No!"

"—but the grasshopper jumps jolly high!" She rushed back to the mantle, but he took both her hands in a vice-like grip and dragged her away. "There is no alternative . . ."

Gothenburg 1921

Viktor Philippe Ǻström was playing hide-and-seek with his cousins. He liked his grandmother's large house in Gothenburg; it was dark and cavernous, with lots of old photographs. His grandmother had been in the theatre when she was very young. She didn't like to talk about it, especially not when Grandfather had been alive, but she used to take Viktor up onto her lap and sing him opera songs until he fell asleep. He liked Grandmother, even if she always seemed sad, even if the house smelled funny.

Viktor was hiding from his cousin Stefan, who was two years older and always boastful. Viktor had taken up station inside a small cabinet, just large enough for his spindly, six-year-old frame. He had been listening to the sound of his own fast breathing, ears perked for Stefan lumbering by, when his eye lighted upon something glowing bright yellow. Sitting on the shelf above him was a small, roundish thing. When he barely brushed it with his fingertips, it felt warm, though made of glass. Ignoring Stefan for the moment, Viktor reached with his full height.

The amber glass fell from the cabinet shelf and shattered all over the floor, pelting Viktor with hot liquid and bits of glass. He began to cry. He watched as a shadow appeared on the floor, switching this way and that, back and forth, like the silhouette of a cat. Accompanied was a rushing sound and dull thuds, as if something large and blind was moving indiscriminately across the floor. The thing began to crawl towards Viktor. Viktor screamed.


End file.
